Today we’re proud to announce that Tom Bruce and Jerry Goldman recently
joined the Free Law Project Board of Directors.

Tom is the Director and co-founder of the Legal Information Institute at the Cornell Law School, where
he has built a strong organization that serves millions of people every
year. He has consulted on four continents, is a member of a number of
standards bodies and committees, and in a previous life made the first
browser for Microsoft Windows.

Jerry is the founder and director of the Oyez Project, a vast and widely utilized multimedia archive devoted to the U.S. Supreme Court and its work. He’s an influential author on a number of political and legal topics, and has received numerous awards for his efforts at Oyez and as a professor at both Chicago-Kent College of Law, and Northwestern University’s Department of Political Science.

Fellow Board Member, Brian Carver, said, “Mike and I have been directing
Free Law Project for a while and when we thought about who we would most
like to help us with our mission, Tom Bruce and Jerry Goldman were our
top two choices. We’re thrilled that these two, who have …

Free Law Project is pleased to announce that its OpenJudiciary.org has
been selected as a winner of the Knight News Challenge on Elections, an
initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The new project will make judicial elections more transparent for
journalists and researchers by creating online profiles of judges.
Profiles will show campaign contributions, judicial opinions, and biographies.

A site such as OpenJudiciary.org is needed because big money is
infiltrating the judicial election process. Academic research has shown
that election years correlate with judges handing down harsher
sentences, even an increased frequency of death sentences.

The money in state judicial elections appears to cause not only a public
perception of partiality (judges being bought), but also real damage to
judicial impartiality as judges are forced to fundraise from the
attorneys and litigants that appear in their courts.

Free Law Project co-founder Brian Carver said, “It is currently
extremely difficult for voters, journalists, or academics to investigate
a judge’s past decisions and …

Co-Founder Brian Carver and I presented at Columbia’s Web Archiving
Conference last month and the videos have now been posted on YouTube.
Brian gave a substantial talk about Juriscraper and how we used a grant
from Columbia to expand it to cover all fifty states:

A long time ago in a courthouse not too far away, people started making
books of every important decision made by the courts. These books became
known as reporters and were generally created by librarian-types of
yore such as Mr. William
Cranch and Alex
Dallas.

These men—-for they were all men—-were busy for the next few centuries
and created thousands of these books, culminating in what we know
today as West’s reporters or as regional reporters like the “Dakota
Reports” or the thoroughly-named, “Synopses of the Decisions of the
Supreme Court of Texas Arising from Restraints by Conscript and Other
Military Authorities (Robards).”

Motivated by our need to identify citations to these reporters, we’ve
taken a stab at aggregating a few facts about them, such as variations
in their name, abbreviation, or years they were published, and put all
that information into our reporters database. Until recently, this
database lived deep inside CourtListener and was only discovered by
intrepid hackers rooting around, but a few months ago we pulled it out,
put it in its own repository, and converted it to better formats so
anyone could more easily re-use it.

We’ve
released new versions of the RECAP extensions for
Chrome
and
Firefox
and they will be auto-updating in your browsers soon.

These are the first new versions in more than two years, and while they
are relatively small releases, we’re very excited to be rolling them out.

The headline feature for these extensions is a new Team Name field that
you can configure in your settings. We are planning some competitions to
see who can upload the most documents to RECAP and to participate,
you’ll have to join a team and fill in this field with the team’s name.
For now, this is a beta feature, so take a look and let us know if you
have ideas for improving or using it.

There are a handful of other fixes that have also landed in these
releases. In both Chrome and Firefox, the icons have been improved to
support high resolution screens, and the extensions have been changed to
support HTTPS uploads, making them more private and secure. In Chrome,
we have a new testing framework, thanks to a volunteer developer, and we
have fixed notifications to work more reliably.

Let’s outline what you should do, what Congress should do, and what the
courts should do:

By James Montgomery Flagg - Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

What you should do about the PACER Problem

As we mentioned in our first
post,
Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org has
written a memorandum detailing a
three-pronged approach that average individuals can take to address the
PACER Problem: Litigation, Supplication, and Agitation. Let’s consider each.

Litigation

It’s probably not fruitful if everyone runs out and sues the courts
over PACER. Carl’s memorandum sketches many of the challenges that such
cases would face. There are people thinking about this carefully,
however, and so if you believe you are particularly likely to have
standing, or have other resources to contribute to such an effort, feel
free to get in touch with us and
we can direct you to the folks having these conversations.

Supplication

Carl’s memorandum also explains that Public.Resource.Org is asking for
a fee exemption from the courts …

The Courts are ignoring the law that Congess passed. In our
tricameral system of government, it is the Congress that holds the
power of the purse. The E-Government Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-347)
provides with respect to PACER fees that the “Judicial Conference
may, only to the extent necessary, prescribe reasonable fees… to
reimburse expenses incurred in providing these services.” So, they
can only charge for public access services such as PACER if those
fees are used to cover the operating expenses for those same
services. In an accompanying Senate report, Congress noted that it
“…intends to encourage the Judicial Conference to move… to a fee
structure in which this information is freely available to the
greatest extent possible.” 107. S. Rept. 174.

However, figuring out exactly how much revenue PACER generates and
how much it costs to operate is such an overcomplicated task that
only one person has ever tried to do it. In 2010, Steve Schultze,
the then …

In January of 2015, Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org posted a memorandum detailing problems with the federal PACER system that is supposed to provide Public Access to Court Electronic Records and outlining a three-pronged approach for addressing these problems this year.

What is the “PACER problem”?

As a result of various problems with the PACER system, the average member of the public has no meaningful access to federal court records. This is the “PACER Problem.”

These “various problems” with the PACER system include:

PACER fees are too high, especially in the case of surprise charges for searches where the total charge for the search is not known until after you have incurred the charge. Using PACER’s search functionality is terrifying. You have no way of knowing what you will be charged until after you have incurred …

In Chief Justice Roberts’ End of Year
Report
there were some astounding figures about the size and scope of PACER,
the Federal system for court filings. Among his figures was the fact
that there are more than “one billion retrievable documents” in PACER:

We believe that this means that PACER is the largest collection of
public domain documents locked behind a pay wall. Having access to this
information is vital to a functioning judiciary and we are working to
break it open.

Public.Resource.org recently published
an excellent memo outlining a campaign to
retrieve from PACER more of its contents and to create pressure for it
to be opened completely. The memo, which is worth a read in itself,
defines a strategy of “litigation, supplication, and agitation.”

Today we’re announcing a plan that should help with the third part of
the strategy: Agitation.

We rolled out a new feature today on CourtListener that allows you to
stay up to date with court opinions and oral arguments as fast as we
know about them. We’re calling it Real Time Alerts, and donors can
start using this now by selecting “Real Time” in the rate drop down when
creating alerts:

Once you’ve set up an alert with this rate, we’ll begin checking the
hundreds of items we download each day and we will send an email as soon
as a new item triggers your alert. Just like our other emails, once you
get the alert, you can click directly on the results to read opinions or
listen to oral arguments.

For journalists and other users with speed-critical work, it’s as simple
as that to keep up with hundreds of courts. Let us know what you think!

The Supreme Court Database includes data for about 8,500 Supreme Court
opinions from 1946 to 2013 and this first pass merges that data with
CourtListener so that:

Our copy of these opinions are enhanced with better parallel
citations. You can now look these items up by U.S. Reporter (U.S.),
The Supreme Court Reporter (S.Ct.), Lawyers’ Edition (L.Ed.) or even
LEXIS citation (U.S.LEXIS). This should make our citation graph
much more robust and should help people like Colin Starger at
University of
Baltimore that
are doing great analyses with this
data. Many
of these items were screen scraped directly from the Supreme Court
website meaning that for these items, this is the first time they
have had proper citations. Here’s an example of the many parallel
citations items now have:

Starting today, as you use CourtListener you’ll see Quick Tips on the
bottom of search results. They show up below search pagination and look
something like this:

The idea behind this feature is to give people quick bits of information
about Free Law Project, CourtListener, RECAP and any other projects that
we create in the future. As of now we’ve seeded the tips with about 20
that we thought would be useful, but because all of our work is in the
open, we’re welcoming our users to add tips that they think would be useful.

To add a tip you’ll need a Github account and some basic HTML skills. If
you have these two things, you can wander over to the list of
tips
and submit some of your own. If they’re good, we’ll add them to the site!

Yesterday the impressive DC Legal Hackers
group held their first annual Le Hackie
Awards and Holiday
Party. Although
we weren’t able to attend the event (it was in D.C.), we’re proud and
gratified to share that Free Law Project played a part in two of the top
ten legal hacks of the year. The first was for our new Oral Arguments
feature that we’ve been blogging so much about lately, and the second
was for Frank Bennett’s Free Law
Ferret,
which he built using code originally developed for CourtListener.

Update: Turns out the Free Law Ferret was from 2013 and was not
awarded a Le Hackie Award. Our mistake was to trust a slide from the
presentation, which contained a typo.

Brian and I couldn’t be happier to see the legal hacking community grow
and we’re humbled to be a part of it. So much fantastic work is getting
done each year, and the legal arena is growing and maturing at a
feverish pace. We hope that the DC Legal Hackers will keep …

The past week has been a busy one for us and we’re excited to announce
that thanks to a generous data donation we’ve added an additional 7,000
oral arguments to
CourtListener.
These files are available now and can already be searched, saved, and
made into podcasts.

Although 7,000 more oral arguments may not sound like much, I must point
out that these files are larger than your average MP3 and this has taken
a week for our powerful server to download and prepare. Our collection
now has more than 200 continuous days of listening — more than six
months of audio.

From here on, we’ll continue getting the latest oral arguments from the
Federal Appeals courts that offer them but we are eager for more
donations so we can build up our archive. Oyez.org is
doing an incredible job with the Supreme Court (and we hope to integrate
these eventually), but if you know somebody in the federal appellate
courts or if you have a collection of oral arguments you’d like to
share, please get in touch!
We’re eager to hear from you and to build the largest collection of oral
arguments that …

It’s really hard to overstate the incredible nature of the open source
community, but if you head over to
CourtListener, you’ll find that between
yesterday and today the entire website has been revamped. This was done
over the past month by a volunteer
developer who took time off work to
give every single page in the entire site a fresh lick of paint.

On top of just plain looking better, the new site has a raft of
improvements that we’re excited about:

The entire site from top to bottom can now be used from your phone,
tablet or desktop. Complicated pages will do the right thing to
adapt to smaller or bigger screens. (Yes, we now use
bootstrap.)

The accessibility of the site has been vastly improved for people
with motility or vision difficulties. Over the next few days we’ll
continue rolling out improvements in this area that will trickle
down even to keyboard-heavy users.

Sharing pages on Facebook or Twitter and saving the site to your
desktop on iOS, Android or Windows now works properly, with good
titles, descriptions and meta data.

First, the sixth circuit has begun putting oral argument audio on
their
website and
we have begun dishing it up through CourtListener. We briefly spoke to
the technology team at the court and their reaction to our questions
about their system was, “Oh, is that on our website already?” So this is
a very new development, even for them.

Right now their site has oral argument audio back to August 7th and we
are in the process of grabbing this audio and putting it in our archive.
Unfortunately, the case in the news right now that’s blocking gay
marriage in the
circuit
was argued one day prior to the oldest files they’ve posted, and so we
don’t have audio for that case, and possibly never will. This is one big
reason we’ve wanted to get into oral arguments on CourtListener and why
we’ve been supported with a grant from Columbia Library to do this work:
This content is simply going dark as new content is published.

We’re very excited to announce that CourtListener is currently in the
process of rolling out support for Oral Argument audio. This is a
feature that we’ve wanted for at least four years — our
name is CourtListener, after all — and one that will bring a raft
of new features to the project. We already have about 500 oral arguments
on the site, and we’ve got many more we’ll be adding over the coming weeks.

For now we are getting oral argument audio in real time from ten
federal appellate
courts.
As we get this audio, we are using it to power a number of features:

Oral Argument files become immediately available in our search results.

A podcast is automatically available for every jurisdiction we
support and for any query that you can dream up. Want a custom
podcast containing all of the 9th circuit arguments for a particular
litigant? You got it.

You can now get alerts for oral arguments so you can be sure that
you keep up with the latest coming out of the courts.

Last Friday, it was reported by the Washington
Post
and Ars
Technica
that Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy, had
sent a letter to Judge Bates, the head of the Administrative Office of
the Courts (AO), urging the AO to put back online the recently-removed PACER
documents from five courts. I had not seen the full letter posted
anywhere yet, so I present it here.

Free Law Project agrees with Senator Leahy that taking these documents
offline represents “a dramatic step backwards” and that the Courts’
currently proposed work-around represents “a troubling increase in
costs…” We hope the AO will be open to restoring online access to
these documents and stand ready to help make these documents freely
available online for the public were that agreeable to the AO.

Brian and I were guests this week on the live Internet show, This Week
in Law on the Twit
Network. In the show we cover a number of topics
ranging from the history of Free Law Project and the need for innovation
in the legal arena to the copyright and trademark issues in the latest
Deadmou5 brouhaha.